CANCER & BIG PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES

A social history of the American medical industry and its schools

[1] It is a fact that allopathic medicine has failed to find a cure for mankind’s greatest scourge for as long as we’ve suffered the disease. The public appear to be resigned to the drip feed of mostly bad news (punctuated by the occasional hopeful sound bite) that emerges from the media. The narrative that there is no cure for cancer on the horizon has become a dogma that goes largely unchallenged by the general public, medical practitioners and cancer patients themselves.

Is such a sustained failure – despite the trillions of dollars thrown at ‘cancer research’ in some of the world’s most prestigious universities and laboratories over decades – really the result of the scale of the challenge or is something else at work?

There exists today with many cancers a very clear upward trend.[2] It has to be wondered as to why. Since President Richard Nixon announced ‘the war on cancer’ in 1971 through taxes, private research and donations we have spent hundreds of billions to find a cure for cancer. Nevertheless the annual death toll attributable to it has risen by 73% which is over one and a half times faster than has the American population grown. This population sees a half million of its numbers perish each year. A hundred years ago flying machines could barely get off the ground and yet today we are visiting distant planets and we can examine any square inch of the world instantly from our living rooms: Yet still the conquering of cancer eludes the medical establishment; why?

Today’s medical cancer apparatus is enormous and so highly invested by society that it needs its patients in order to survive just as much as the patients need the apparatus. The amount spent on narrow research and drugs is vast. A cancer patient in America typically spends/costs $124,600 pa. With one million new patients a year that amounts to spending of $124.6 billion a year in the United States alone.[3]

Many might ask why the medical professions are actively unwilling to investigate certain approaches. We investigate this question and in doing so begin at the roots of present practice 100 years ago when ‘official medicine’ finally managed to entirely dominate.

At the turn of twentieth century in America new, and likely very profitable treatments, emerged and the ‘medical doctors’ together with The American Medical Association (AMA) aligned with strong financial forces to transform medicine into a vast industry. The financier J. P. Morgan was already backing the genius Tesla in the energy industry until he pulled his funding of all research when Tesla proved that he could supply the worlds energy needs ‘gratis’ from the ionosphere: Morgan could not attach a meter to that and he also wanted to cover the world in copper from the mines that he owned. He moved to jump onto the medical bandwagon as did (in an extremely significant way) John D. Rockefeller and Carnegie indeed they were to become the economic foundation of the new medical industry.

The takeover of the medical industry was accompanied by a similar appropriation of the medical schools. They offered tremendous amounts of money to those Universities schools that would cooperate. As part of the assimilation they required a number of their people be put on to all of the boards who accepted their donation. Thus the schools were literally taken over by the embedded financiers. They invested in equipment, machines and teachers but the whole was skewed to pharmaceuticals and drugs – the manufacturers of which were owned by the banking oligopoly[4]. Radium fever swept medicine and the price of radium rose 1000% almost overnight[5]. The drug industry blossomed under the patent medicine business. Education and licensing arrangements were skewed to exclude the empiricists (i.e. other than allopath’s).[6] Soon in America only AMA approved doctors could legally practice medicine. Comparatively Great Britain had somewhat beaten this move by nearly fifty years with the rather draconian 1858 Medicine Act in seeking to address:

‘…a need to restrict entry to what was seen as an overcrowded profession…. medical practitioners were concerned both to control the number of qualified practitioners entering the profession and to reduce the competition from practitioners who were not qualified.'[7]

‘In 1851 there were an estimated 6000 unlicensed medical practitioners operating in the UK but only 5000 regular doctors, apothecaries & surgeons’,[8]

In a brief 20 years the AMA had come to dominate medical practice and if you went to see a doctor the likelihood would be that you would walk out with pills because that is what they were trained to do. Today most research has been pulled from Universities and given to ‘for profit’ organisations that can control the studies, data and exclude effectively anything that Big-Pharma cannot put a meter on. In 2014 Big-Pharma’s global sales were $0.903trillion.[9] The top ten Big-Pharma make more money than the other 490 Fortune 500 Companies combined and the US economy relies on disease rather than prevention in a mind-set similar to its reception of new energy technologies.

Today close on 20% of GDP is spent on healthcare but one can argue that healthcare is less about care than about disease maintenance. People are screened and this recruitment group yields a cancer patient; it is not at all about prevention. It is in the business of treating disease not wiping its customer base out. The patient thoroughly scared then enters the regime. The cancer regime is basically radical surgery which may not address metastasis and does not address the bodies inability to control the underlying cells and what has gone wrong, drugs – chemotherapy (curiously no single recorded cause of death attributed to it) and which work only in about 3% of cases and thirdly radiation. The cancer business seems to want to pigeonhole and control. Pennies are not spent on prevention but hundreds of thousands on the trilogy[10] thereafter.

Medical Schools may teach one morning on nutrition to its students in four years; the result then is likely that the average doctor’s wife or secretary knows more about nutrition than he does. Information is controlled – The FDA make it illegal for supplement companies to put the truth on their own label and if anyone in America stood up on television and said ‘eat this orange it will cure your scurvy’ they would be locked up. The FDA sought to ban, or completely control, dietary supplementation[11] but was thwarted in this endeavour by The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994 which eviscerated its enforcement powers. It now seeks by purposeful manoeuvre through Codex Elimentarious to limit dosages of all and at levels naturopathic empiricists view as completely un-therapeutic.

It is wondered again if a cure for cancer was found and Big Pharma could not put a meter on it whether it ever would see the light of day. Many of these have allegedly surfaced in modern times and this research will explore those and their fate together with fully exploring the fiscal story of the existing industry sector.

The key themes of this research are to firstly bring out who was at work and secondly to see what they were doing that affected and shaped the delivered medical/pharmaceutical utility that we experience today. It is thirdly concerned with the influences consequent of these forces upon preventions, cures and approaches that might not sit comfortably inside that agenda. Fourthly the political and economic forces and tools that were/are used will be examined. Also about the characters involved: the business magnates and industrialists who not only created financial empires and laid the foundations of capitalist America as we know it today but, even more importantly, shaped the legacy of cancer that knows no cure and knows how to monetize its continued existence as an industry in its own right.

The following are some of the main players who shaped the way things are today.

John D. Rockefeller (1839 – 1937)

Mr. Rockefeller was born to one Dr Bill Levingston the ‘Celebrated Cancer Specialist’. Actually he was neither celebrated cancer specialist or doctor and had simply assumed all of these roles. James Corbett informs us that ‘William Levingston was your-run-of-the-mill snake oil huckster, someone who had no compunction about preying on the weak and the innocent in pursuit of wealth and power’.[12]Actually, his name was not Levingston either: it was William Avery Rockefeller. He had only assumed it after being indicted for raping a girl in Cayuga in 1849. In researching his book ‘Titan, The Life of John D. Rockefeller Snr’ as cited by Dinitia Smith in The New York Times July 13 1998[13] the key to JDR’s penny-pinching puritanical personality was this father figure of a snake oil selling adulterer who left his family penniless.

JDR’s rise was helped by the Civil War. In 1861 the twenty five year old Rockefeller was building a very successful merchandising business from Cleveland buoyed up by war orders. By 1863 he had saved enough money to invest in an oil refining business and by the end of the war had enough to take over the company. By 1880 led by his determination to ‘make more and still more money’ his Standard Oil Company was refining 95% of America’s oil.

In the years following 1911 Rockefeller continued assimilating nearly all of the competition acquiring such names as Exxon, Texaco and by foreign cartel agreements (more on that later) Royal Dutch Shell and Russian Nobel Oil Works. Staggeringly huge as these holdings were they were completely dwarfed by what was achieved in later years through the magic of international finance and investment banking. Today The Rockefeller Empire in tandem with their Chase Manhattan Bank (now J P Morgan Chase) owns over half of the pharmaceutical interests in the United States.

It is by far the largest drug manufacturing combine in the world and the pharmaceutical industry today is the world’s second largest manufacturing industry after the arms industry.[14] If one analyses magazine advertising back to 1948 it shows that the larger drug companies spent in excess of $1.1 billion on advertising. Of this Rockefeller-Morgan interests (which went entirely to Rockefeller after Morgan’s death) controlled 80%.[15] This all began early in the twentieth century when these petrochemical giants organised a coup on the medical research facilities of Universities and hospitals and further extended their reach to overseas Universities and medical schools through their ‘International Education Board’. Those that were not drug based or who would not transmute to it were ignored and soon dissolved. The Rockefeller Foundation was originally set up in 1904 and embedded its ‘nominees’ in all institutions receiving its grants thus setting the stage for the general re-education of society. It was known of course to them that ‘the profits of control’ the profits that fall to those that control an enterprise/sector are very many times that of those allocated to mere shareholders, the benefits of insider information, market control, fee’s and the cross breeding of high profit contracts et al bring tremendous advantage.

Rockefeller and his few peers perfected the model of ‘efficiency through philanthropy’; they gave money away but because of the strings attached it came back with profits. It was the origin of the ‘matching funds’ formulae in that a half is given and that is matched dollar for dollar. The result is that people think that you are utterly wonderful and the library is dedicated totally to you. These foundations were also of course completely tax exempt, were run by loyal underlings and were a very efficient way to launder a very sizable proportion of national product.

The Federal Reserve System was foisted onto the American people by these oligarchs. They had observed the ways in which the European ‘Central Banks’ seemed to be able to create money out of thin air and indeed how after hypothecation others money (which may anyway also have come from thin air) could be used to create greatly multiplied and serviced debt. In 1913 The Federal Reserve System was introduced into legislation by Senator Nelson Aldrich who himself had been brought into the ‘inner circle’ when his daughter married John D. Rockefeller Jnr. Their son Winthrop was to be made Chairman of Chase National Bank. Aldrich was well known as Rockefeller’s representative and consequently enjoyed tremendous power on Capitol Hill. The Federal Reserve remains privately owned.[16]

Today David Rockefeller is Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) which is itself sustained by grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Fund and similar interlocked tax exempt foundations. Harper’s Magazine in July 1958 reported that membership of CFR was the very key to high government office: Indeed almost every office of Federal Government and every major newspaper is headed by its membership despite the average citizen never having heard of it.

The Control of Education

Prior to 1910 medical professionalism in America was extremely poor. It was still very possible to simply buy a degree. There existed an extremely low level of knowledge and quackery abounded.[17] Considerable money was needed to address these problems and the people who had heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry saw the opening.

The likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller already had the tax exempt foundations which practised ‘efficiency through philanthropy’ and thus were quick to move. By the end of the nineteenth century Rockefeller and Carnegie were competing in their philanthropy and Carnegie was ahead. The Reverend Frederick T. Gates (1853-1929) was hired both as a manager of Rockefeller’s wealth and his medical philanthropies and it was he who articulated the role that medicine might play in shaping society.[18]

The American Medical Association (AMA) in 1904 created The Council for Medical Education (CME). It was deeply concerned at the state of medicine in the USA and wanted to improve it and to raise general remuneration. By 1908 it was struggling with its own internal committee differences and financial problems and issues were aired with The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, whom it reciprocally courted. The Rockefeller-Carnegie combine moved with perfect timing. Henry S. Pritchett, the president of the Carnegie Foundation approached the AMA directly and simply offered to take over the entire project. The minutes of the meeting of the AMA’s Council on Medical Education held in New York in December of 1908 yield a telling story:

He [Pritchett] agreed with the opinion previously expressed by the members of The Council that while The Foundation would be guided very largely by the Council’s investigation, to avoid the usual claims of partiality no more mention should be made in the report of The Council than any other source of information. The report would therefore be, and have the weight of, a disinterested body, which would then be published far and wide. It would do much to develop public opinion.[19]

This is another emblematic example of ‘the philanthropic formulae’ at work. The AMA had already done a large proportion of the work and the total Carnegie investment was only $10,000.[20] These upgraders of medical education were set to reap a massive bonus from public opinion and gain an opportunity to control a huge and essential area of American life. Pritchett in turn directed the task to Abraham Flexner (1866-1959) who was then working for The Carnegie Foundation and in 1910 The Flexner report was published. The Flexner Report, as it was called, was published in 1910. As anticipated, it was “published far and wide,” and it did “do much to develop public opinion.” The report quite correctly pointed out the inadequacies of medical education at the time. No one could take exception with that. It also proposed a wide range of sweeping changes, most of which were entirely sound. No one could take exception with those, either. The alert researcher will note, however, the recommendations emphatically included the strengthening of courses in pharmacology and the addition of research departments at all “qualified” medical schools. [21] This was presented to the academic community and to the halls of Congress and then the philanthropists offered the money to ‘reform’ the medical schools:

Starting with John Hopkins Medical School in 1913, The General Education Board supported reorganisations which brought about full time instruction in the clinical as well as the basic science departments of the first two years of medical education at Washington University in St Louis, at Yale, and at Chicago. In 1923 , a grant was made to the University of Iowa in the amount of $2,250,000 by The General Education Board and The Rockefeller Foundation. Similar grants in smaller amounts were made to the following state-supported medical schools: University of Colorado, University of Oregon, University of Virginia, and University of Gergia. An appropriation was made to the University of Cincinnatti, an institution which received some of its support from municipal sources. Howard University and Meharry Medical School were strengthened, the later by some eight million dollars. The General Education Board and The Rockefeller Foundation later made substantial grants to the Medical Schools at Harvard, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Cornell, Tulane, Western Reserve, Rochester, Duke, Emory, and the Memorial Hospital in New York affiliated with Cornell.[22]

And so, the Flexner Report was above reproach and, undoubtedly, it performed a service that was much needed at the time. It is what followed in the wake of the report that reveals its true purpose in the total plan. Rockefeller and Carnegie began immediately to shower hundreds of millions of dollars on those medical schools that were vulnerable to control. The ‘non-conformists’ and naturopathic-ally leaning non-druggists were denied the prestige and the money and were effectively forced out of business. All non-mainstream practitioners were targeted. From the turn of the century consumers (due to price) preferred optometrists to ophthalmologists: The AMA ridiculed the optometrists as ‘quacks’ and sought to place extreme limitations on them when they could not outlaw them entirely.

Homeopathy enjoyed a very significant following but was (to this day) effectively driven completely underground. With its monopoly the AMA sought to fix prices as it was thought ‘unethical’ for consumers to have any input over what was paid. Pricing was made uniform over the entire profession and advertising or violating them was also considered completely unethical. They even made it illegal for charities to give free care without first checking the patient’s financial status and for pharmacists to deliver treatment directly.

The then pharmaceutical industry via the tax exempt foundations was able to capture the medical schools. Enormous sums of money were offered for the latest buildings, equipment and teachers but in accepting it the institutions had to take onto their boards two or three of the financier’s (five) representatives. These ‘plants’ were most often Abraham Flexner (who held a BA in Classics) and his brother Simon Flexner. Warren Weaver was Director of The Natural Sciences at The Rockefeller Foundation and commented:

…were not only involved in the awarding of grants for The Rockefeller Foundation, but they were councelors to heads of institutions, to lay board members, to members of staffs at medical schools and universities in the United States and abroad. They served as sounding boards, as stimulators of ideas and programs, as mediators in situations of difficulty. [23]

Generally a thorough massaging of the curriculum occurred and students, through an ensured Department of Pharmacology, students would learn of drugs, drugs and drugs. Effectively doctors became the salespersons for drugs and patients would surely walk out with a pill. The historian Joseph Goulden comments:

Flexner had the ideas, Rockefeller and Carnegie had the money, and their marriage was spectacular. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and The General Education Board showered money on tolerably respectable schools and on professors who expressed an interest in research.[24]

Since 1910 the foundations have invested many billions of dollars into the medical schools with nearly half of faculty members receiving a proportion of their income from foundation research grants, whereas sixteen percent of them are fully funded in this way.

Abraham Flexner (1866-1959)

After 1910 the “classicist” Flexner, his brother and William Welch of The Rockefeller Institute became three of the most influential men in American medicine. Whilst every little detail of schools curricular could not be addressed with certainty what is not taught was. Not one penny of foundation money would go to a researcher who held the un-orthodox view that the best medicine is in nature. That is perhaps until the cartel at work had monopolised the supplement and food product industry as it has actually sought to do.

Attention will always steer to manmade drugs. Modern medical approaches such as surgery, drugs, cancer radiotherapy treatments and educational methods largely exist because there was huge influence and an almost unlimited amount of money to support their promotion and expansion. Their existence today has very little to do with truth, legitimate ‘science’, or any inherent validity or effectiveness to the theories and methods involved. Clifton Leaf a cancer survivor and editor of Fortune Magazine pointed out in an investigative article in 2004[25] that cancer shrinkage is what research entirely majors on ‘even though 90% of the time people die from metastases not from localised tumours’: cancer.org comments:

Metastasis is the process whereby cancer cells spread from the site of the original tumor to one or more other places in the body. And with upwards of 90% of all cancer suffering and death associated with metastasis, it is the single most significant challenge to management of the disease.[26]

He continued that ‘funding for research is usually granted to very narrow studies that are seeking to publish findings rather than find a cure for cancer. For example less than point five per cent of grants from The National Cancer Institute (NCI) dating back to 1972 focused primarily on metastases and ‘92% didn’t even mention it’.[27] Rockefeller’s money was available at the inception to fund massive PR campaigns, establish ‘professional’ publications and societies, steamroller over the competition (regardless of their legitimacy or value) and continue selling the ideas until accepted and institutionalised within the basic fabrics of society. It sought to do this primarily by courting governments to which attention should now be turned.

The American Medical Association and Federal Drug Agency

The American Medical Association was founded in 1847 and incorporated in 1897. Within a year of foundation it was moving to label anything not in its control as ‘quackery’. An analysis of the AMA archives shows that at its main meeting of 1912 in Atlantic City it had, an entire department devoted to ‘quackery’, it published a book that year entitled ‘Nostrums and Quackery’ that had sold out immediately all initial 10,000 copies. It further reports ‘One encouraging fact is that a large number of newspapers have been won over and are copying much of the matter we publish’.[28] The trend continued and it was held by Morris Fishbein the public face and staunch editor of The AMA Journal that the code-word for competition was quackery.[29]

Fishbein had reigned from 1924 until 1949 when he finally lost a legal battle with Harry Hoxsey whose cancer cure he had fought to shut down for decades after Hoxsey had refused to licence it to him. Fishbein had failed his anatomy and had never practiced medicine in his life. Ruth Harmer characterized Fishbein as ‘having the ruthlessness of a shark’ and concluded that he ‘managed to hold back the twentieth century for 50 years for the benefit of organized medicine’.[30] Those who paid considerable advertising sums to Fishbein’s journal would receive the AMA’s ‘seal of approval’ regardless of benefit and those who did not would most likely be labelled as worthless. His opposition to any food or natural remedy that was not a manmade drug based was following the simple fact that the AMA’s power base and growth required drug sales. Pulitzer prize (1984) author Paul Starr described the interlocking interests:[31]

‘Medical authority in prescribing drugs and other products enabled the AMA to stand between the manufacturers and their markets. This strategic gatekeeping role permitted the AMA, in effect, to levy an advertising toll on the producers. Revenues from journal advertisements became the principal source of funds for the association. In 1912 the AMA set up a cooperative advertising bureau, which channelled advertisements to state medical journals. The bureau gave the AMA considerable financial leverage over the state medical societies and helped bind the national association even more tightly together’.

Evidence produced by Eustace Mullins suggests that Fishbein ignored medical documentation proving that products promoted by the AMA were in fact dangerous. One caused blindness another quietly killed people in their sleep and yet another was so poisonous that it caused the deaths of a large numbers of users.[32]

Morris Fishbein (1889-1976)

In 1963 The AMA formed its Committee on Quackery which immediately set out to diligently eliminate chiropractic. It vigorously encouraged its medical physicians not to associate with chiropractors and (as by then) if a doctor wanted to legally practice medicine in the USA (and certainly not to be labelled a quack) he had to practice ‘consensus medicine’ exactly as sanctioned by the AMA. The campaign continued and was only halted when the AMA lost a nationally covered legal class action on February 7, 1990 where it was declared in Judgement that the AMA had conducted ‘an illegal boycott in restraint of trade directed at chiropractors generally’.[33]

In modern times we note that Vioxx (cited as unsafe by the FDA whistle-blower David Graham)[34] killed more Americans soldiers than did the Vietnam War, and even after that the FDA panel voted to put it back on the market. Aspartame, the artificial sweetener in nearly every soft drink sold, is known by the FDA to cause cancer in the laboratory but was approved in bizarre circumstances. When it looked as if it were to be banned Donald Rumsfeld, who was Chairman of Searle, became involved and despite it also causing seizures, migraines and blindness it remained ‘approved’.

Despite The University of Hawaii [35] showing that frequent consumption of sodium nitrite (which is added to near all processed meats) enhanced the chance of pancreatic cancer by 67%, brain tumours by 300% and colon cancer by 200% the practice continues completely uninterrupted.

There exist very many other examples of concern: Hydrogenated Oils, Yeast Extract, MSG obesity causing excitotoxins [36], Coca-Cola and others Phosphoric Acid which immediately strips minerals out of the body are amongst them.

From the beginning Big-Pharma knew that they could treat sick people but to really make huge profits the trick is to sell drugs to people who are well. Moynihan & Cassels [37] book opens with the revelation of how Merck’s aggressive CEO Henry Gadsden said in an interview with Fortune Magazine [38] of his distress that the company’s potential markets ‘had been limited to sick people.’ Suggesting that he would rather Merck were more like chewing gum manufacturer Wrigley’s. Gadsden continued ‘that it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people’ because then Merck ‘would be able to sell to everyone’. He would doubtlessly be pleased with the marketing strategy of today’s industry where the healthy are targeted as aggressively as the sick indeed the ‘worried well are turned into the worried sick’.

Healthy middle-aged women now have a silent bone disease called osteoporosis to go with their pre-menstrual tension which is now re-labelled pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder. Men do not escape and have to carry a lifelong condition called high cholesterol, which incidentally has spawned the highest selling drugs of all time in statins (that in turn it seems may actually have created an outbreak of type 2 diabetes): A level cup of blueberries a day would do a better job than any of the statins and not bring with it insulin resistance, a fuzzy mind or stiff muscles.

One of the extremely worrying and serious manifestations of this market manipulation is Big Pharma seeking to embed their product into ‘disease maintenance’ schemes. They seek things that will maintain bio-chemistry and not kill so you remain a customer for life. This has an even darker side: The first sign of it emerged when ‘screening’ of adults for something called (thought of) ‘attention deficit disorder’ was commissioned. It found that 4 out of 5 adults tested positive for it. In a world where candidate for drug approval only had (and has) to show a 5% efficacy rate for the control group before a drug is licenced and promoted as effective for everyone it was not long before a chemical holocaust followed.

What followed that is shocking: In 2002 President George W. Bush, without votes or public awareness, created The New Freedom Commission (NFT). This comprised of people with enormous ties to the pharmaceutical industry and exists for the purpose of getting mental health screening into all public schools. The screening concluded that more than half of the children tested should be labelled as having psychiatric disorders and prescribed addictive drugs that will likely follow them for life (as will the labelling). In 2010 42% of foster children in America, including those of pre-school age, were made to take serious, potentially deadly and certainly addictive drugs that have no benefit but only risks. Adderall an amphetamine is now the most commonly prescribed drug for those diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Originally it was a widely used adult only weight loss drug called Obetrol but was taken off the market because of its addictiveness.The industry’s old friend The FDA allowed the exact same drug to be renamed, re packaged and marketed to children.

Big-Pharma knows psychiatry is a lucrative market and takes full advantage by teaming up with The American Psychiatric Association (APA) which in recent times has seen the number of ‘mental disorders’ created by it to rise to over 350; none of which has an objective diagnostic test. For every new ‘illness’ there is of course a new pill. The APA in fact receives more money from Big-Pharma than any other medical association.

This symbiosis is not the first time that pharmaceuticals have brought Federal Government actions to encourage the use of drug regimes in children. The Federal Education Department in 1991 began to pay fund craving schools hundreds of dollars for every pupil diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. It seemed that the schools preferred the money to the drugged zombies that it needed then to try and teach.

The USDA and FDA are largely staffed by ex-pharma corporate employees. When they finally leave the FDA they very often get jobs in the private industry which they had previously ‘regulated’. Response to this symbiosis can be seen in issues such as mad cow (prion) disease. If a beast tests negative then that is that, if however it tests positive then this result is inconclusive. A second test is required and that can only be done in a USDA lab as to test one’s own cow and safety testing are both illegal. Tweaking the emphasis of results protects the very industries that it is supposed to regulate.

People substitute personal responsibility for themselves to the FDA who ‘look after us’ and have all of the power. It is assumed that they are all honest people, great scientists and never experience any financial flattery. Should you say find something growing in your back garden that when applied to your melanoma made it go away completely you would be very pleased. If though however you try to give it to your neighbour you will go straight to jail because you (non-AMA approved laity) are prescribing/administering an un-licensed substance. To get it ‘approved’ would cost an absolute minimum of $100 million and could be S1.1 billion and the only people that can afford these sums are Big Pharma. Nature Journal conducted the largest survey upon allied decision-making at work and published:

In the investigations of the panels that make clinical guidelines – documents that govern the diagnosis and treatment of patients – Nature found that more than one third of the authors declared financial links to relevant drug companies, with around 70% of panels being affected. In one case every member of the panel has been paid by the company responsible for the drug that was ultimately recommended. These links with pharmaceutical companies are more worrying than the financial conflicts known to plague clinical trials and reviews, say public health experts, because the guidelines have such a direct effect on the drugs that doctors prescribe.[39]

We the people are unprotected, while the oligopoly [An oligopoly is a market structure in which a few firms dominate] of the pharmaceutical industry is protected by law. Anyway there would be no interest in your weed because it is naturally occurring and un-patentable and thus its effects remain unproven and conveniently not a threat to anything else. This situation can be contrasted to the FDA’s gentle and unsuccessful efforts over three years to persuade E. R. Squibb & Sons in 1969 to follow up firm evidence that its drug Cinanserin caused tumours in the livers of rats. Human trials were therefore stopped but Squibb did not want to reassess those that it had already been tested upon. Comparing this unsuccessful approach of persuasion to its tactics of raids, confiscation, jail et al to those holding seemingly working alternative treatments is enlightening.

Three years later the National Academy of Sciences set up a committee to act when a drug was found to be dangerous; – the Vice President of Squibb was appointed its head.

The FDA conducts, and certainly has waged, an aggressive war on non-drug medicines, organic vitamins and food supplements. It constantly informs us that ‘nutritional quackery’ yields big profits but it remains oddly quiet about the mega profits of the largest sector following armaments. Much of its efforts are spent on warning of the dangers or non-efficacies of same (even if Chinese medicine had been going for thousands of years) but by comparison its approach to drugs is actually implied admonition. To example this in July 1971 on the subject of ‘Should People Fear Drugs because Of Possible Side Effects’ it is found that they published a factsheet [40] stating:

Drugs should be respected rather than feared. A physician’s decision to use a drug is a considered one. It is his decision that it is better to treat a disease with a certain drug than leave it untreated, and that there is greater danger in not using the drug’.

Any physician who has tried to use anything other than AMA man-made drugs can attest to the fact that the sentiment contained here relating to physicians supremacy is simply not true. With increasing regulation over what may or may not be prescribed through such Federal Agencies as the Professional Standards Review Organisation [PSRO] it is clear that the government would prefer simply doctors to administer approved only treatments in response to only sanctioned diagnosis. Further the FDA clearly advocates that drugs should be ‘respected’ and not ‘feared’. This is a curious contrast to its response to organic foods and it is interesting to reflect here that there has never been a disaster in natural un-patented remedies similar to thalidomide or any of the other dangers earlier and here alluded to. A few more might be mentioned:

Eraldin (for heart disease) – Corneal damage including blindness.

Paracetamol (painkiller) – 1,500 people had to be hospitalized in Great Britain in 1971.

Never has the widely used over the counter drug ‘Aspirin’ (which sells sixteen billion tablets per year and directly causes ninety deaths) suffered a fraction of the censorship of any of the known and completely harmless vitamins and foodstuffs that are known to prevent many cancers significantly. Turmeric, vitamins A,B,C, D, hot peppers, green tea, Indo-3 -Carbinol (Brassicaceae-cruciferous vegetable), boron, PH levels and O2.

Modern approaches to investigation of disease are hampered by the misplaced logic that something (causes) is looked for when actually the cause is the lack of something. What revolutionary change if more Doctors realized the solution to cancer and much else can simply be found in the foods that we eat (or don’t eat).The implications will not just apply to a trillion dollar industry of power-masters but to every doctor as no-one wants to hear that he has learned the wrong thing.

Research and development in the pharmaceutical industry only supports incremental improvement of medicine rather than genuine breakthroughs. This is because the costs of clinical trials are so high and the barriers to FDA approval so costly that it is only Big-Pharma who can afford to sponsor it. Their motivation is simply to show that the new drug is an improvement on the old one and a nice new timed patent can be applied again. Nowhere in this endeavour does prevention hold any allure let alone interest in complete natural cures that cannot play host to a patent or a cash generating mechanism. It is clearly demonstrated that anything that cannot be morphed into a synthetic man-made drug that can attach the patent and the meter will indeed be ignored; not just ignored but banned and ridiculed reflexively.

When it transpires that a substance can be synthesized, mystified, elaborated, patented and charged a fortune for, then one can be sure also that the glory for it is earnestly steered to the wonders of the drug company.

What might be done? Perhaps the first move is by having statute require every trial to list everyone who has been involved and who sponsored the paper. Have Universities ban ‘ghost-writing’ guns for hire. Let there be full disclosure of all results and previous trials whether published and or favourable. Let there be transparency on all company dealings/contacts with any health professional or recipient institutions. Furthermore encourage and mandate patient sufferer groups to write to the drug companies to legally establish if they are holding anything back. Let a formal panel of truly independent experts be established that itself investigates areas of interest and then requires that government grant out meaningful and monitored research to Universities not drug companies: The rabbit has perhaps been weeding the lettuce patch for too long.